In Places Women Make, Jane Jose writes that she is ‘not proving a theory about the skills of men versus those of women’, but celebrating ‘the places in cities we know women have given us’.

Jose moves with sometimes disorienting rapidity from place to place, from female lord mayor to colonial matron to feisty 1970s female activist. We learn that the female perspective is ‘different’, that women are natural storytellers and homemakers, that ‘listening and talking is the way women love to work’. We are continually told that women are ‘instinctive’, ‘warm’, ‘intuitive’, ‘always concerned with the survival of the species’, and ‘love gardening and making gardens’. Some women, ‘despite these female characteristics’, are also determined, ambitious, persistent, and strong. Most women she includes are in positions of wealth and privilege, either by marriage or birth. There are few working-class heroines here.